Poorhouse Fair (10 page)

The action of his feet became unconscious; the stately mass of the upward staircase passed in front of him and to his left. He stopped short, his coarse breathing suspended. On a steel bannister on the fourth floor the bird roosted fussily, shifting its awkward feet on the too broad perch and fanning its wings for balance. The bird was so small Lucas fitfully lost sight of its green in the multiplication of planes created by looking up the stairwell diagonally. Then it flickered, and with a whir mounted the terrible volume below it; hung there angrily, not so much beating its wings as shaking them in a tantrum, above Lucas, who stared beseechingly at the spinning pale belly, even stretching out his hands, to attempt to catch the bird as it fell. The parakeet folded its wings and dipped between Lucas's head and the leaning edge of olive iron beneath the stairs, veered down another corridor, and with an abrupt backwards motion, landed, and like any small gentleman walked through a waiting open door.

Desperate, yet convinced in minutes it would be over, Lucas ran down the hall, so unused to running he ran crooked, his shoulder heavily brushing the wall. This was the west wing. He had marked the door where the parakeet had entered and threw it open. On a white bed beneath white sheets a sunken invalid lay, dreamy with heavy injections, the sheet falling away where the legs should have braced it. The parakeet was perched on the foot of the bed.

THE GREEN FLOWER had sprouted unsurprisingly; the appearance of a bear seemed to follow from that. Now the bear growled. It seemed sorry for something, but then he was sorry too, and though there was no need to say so he smiled. The bear pointed; the flower leaped; the flower skimmed over the ceiling, and at a command from the bear the door closed sharply, saying "Idiot." The bear lifted its black arms and sank from view, and the flower bloomed on the bed, its bright eye frightening. He was glad when the bear came again. A chair fell lazily, and the bear was of course sorry about that, and ashamed. Then the bear grew very clever and plucked the green flower from a picture on the wall. He was so proud, he tried to show it, but of course if he opened his hands too wide the flower would leap again. It occurred to him that it all had been arranged to amuse him, and he laughed obligingly, so they would not feel sorry, and continued laughing when they had gone through the door, for them to hear, though curiously he was not sorry when they had left him alone again.

DOWNSTAIRS the strange thing was Conner's entry into the sitting room. He himself felt the strangeness keenly; it was a criticism of him. When the dining-hall had emptied quickly after his arrival, Buddy's chatter had grated unfeelingly on his sense that in two and a half years he had quite failed to get himself across to these people. And he felt, important within him, something he should get across, a message more momentous than his desire to be their friend, "friend" being perhaps less the word than "guide." So he courageously decided, today being a dislocated day anyway, to join them sociably. There was in his decision a shadow of the supposition that Mendelssohn--so much in the air since the rain began--would have done so. Once, however, in the room where he knew they tended to gather, he hesitated; the old people were grouped in the sofa and the chairs by the window, and a conversation held their interest. Only Mary Jamiesson noticed that he had entered. The surprise her face showed him made it harder for him to declare himself; tightened the screw on his silence.

Hook was saying in a speechifying manner, ". . . received money from the hands of the northern manufactur-ers. Now that was what was said in my father's day."

"Look at an old penny, John," Amy Mortis said, "the next time you have one. That's the face of no grafter,"

"Hav-ing your face on coinage," was the considered reply, "doesn't make an honest man. Else why would we hold the opinion we do of the Emperor Nero?"

Hook tilted his cigar with satisfaction at himself. His antagonist's goiter shook as she made a crude counter-thrust. "You don't think then he should have freed the slaves? You think the slaves should still be that way?"

"Ah, they still were. Had the northern manufactur-ers been half so concerned with the slaves in their own mills as they were with those in the fields of the South, they would have had no need to make the war for the sake of munitions profits. But they were jealous. Their hearts were consumed by envy. They had taken a beating in the Panic of '57. The civili-zation of the south menaced their pocket-books. So as is the way with the mon-ied minority they hired a lawyer to do their dirty work, Lincoln."

"They should have kept the niggers down then?" Amy said, restating her charge, with the implication that it had been evaded by the old debater.

Conner conceived of a way to postpone inserting himself into their circle. The room was damp and chilled by the change of weather. None of the inmates had thought to light a fire, though dry wood was stacked pyramidally by the great fireplace, a black carven thing shipped from Bavaria by Mrs. Andrews, as fruit of a flighty excursion. All he needed to light a fire was paper. He moved about, with only Mary Jamiesson studying him, searching; accustomed to his office, he was bewildered that a room could contain so little paper. In a dark corner he did find, meticulously stacked on a table, some copies of a monthly publication of the Lutheran diocese titled Sweet Charity, forwarded to a male pensioner who had died the previous year in the west wing and to whom this musty stack appeared to form a monument. Conner took several of these white magazines and crumpled them.

"Not down," Hook said, "but not everywhichway either. Where do you think the freed Negro was to find work, if not on the home plantation? Now did the manufac-turers want him in the northern cities? Now if I may have a minute of your time, good lady, endure this old fella for the length of one anecdote. Rafe Beam, my father's hired man when I was a boy on my father's farm ten miles this side of the Delaware, came from Pennsylvan-i-a, and had been raised near a settlement of the Quakers. The Quakers among the city dwellers had a great repu-tation for good works, and in Buchanan's day were much lauded for passing the runaway slaves on up to Canada. Ah. But the truth of it was, this old fella who was the patriarch of the sect would harbor the Negroes in the summer, when they would work his fields for nothing, and then when the cold weather came, and the crops were in, he would turn them out, when they had never known a winter before. One black man balked, you know, and the old fella standing on the doorstep said so sharp: 'Dost thou not hear thy Master calleth thee?' "

Everyone laughed; Hook was an expert mimic. The hiss of avarice and the high-pitched musical fluting of the hypocrite had been rebuilt in their midst, and Hook's face had submitted to a marvelous transformation, the upper lip curling back in fury, then stiffening to go with the sanctimony of the arched eyebrows. Smiling a bit himself, he pulled on his cigar and concluded, "And no doubt he was a fair specimen of those so desirous to aid the Negro."

It puzzled Conner to overhear such lively discussions of dead issues. The opposition of Republican and Democrat had been unreal since the Republican administrations of a generation ago. The word "Negro" itself was quaint.

Dark-skinned people dominated the arts and popular culture; intermarriage was fashionable, psychologists encouraged it; the color bar had quite melted. The Enforced Reforms and Regulated Riots, so stirring to Conner's youth, might never have occurred, to hear Hook talk.

Silently Conner laid the paper and logs and applied a match. He pictured his presence being at last revealed by a triumphant burst of flame. The glossy stock of Sweet Charity burned reluctantly, however, and the dark oily smoke slithering from the air spaces between the logs persisted in curling into the room. After a minute flames were visible and it became clear the chimney would not draw; the flue was closed. In a hurry Conner poked his head into the fireplace, looking for a catch, and as rapidly withdrew it, at the scent of singed hair. The lever must be on the surface of the fireplace. There seemed to be only carved bearheads and scrolls and cherubs dotted all over with highlights. Mistrusting Ms eyes, his hands flittered across the black craggy surface, cold as marble.

"Buchanan, I suppose," Mrs. Mortis said, "was doing a first-rate job, eh John?"

"A ver-y unfairly esti-mated man," Hook slowly replied. "The last of the presidents who truly represented the entire country; after him the southern states were slaves to Boston, as surely as Alaska. Buchanan, you know, had been the ambassador to Russia, and was very well thought-of there."

A small man with broad eyebrows, whose name, Conner believed, was Fuller, came over softly and whispered, "I think this does something." He touched a short chain hanging from the mouth of a bear, and Conner roughly pulled it. For a moment the fire continued sluggish and smoky, then the draft caught; with a jerk the smoke whipped inward, and the dry logs roared. "Birch," Fuller said, "has its own smell don't it?"

"Where is that smoke?" Amy Mortis asked aloud.

"We've built a fire," Fuller said before Conner could himself speak.

Conner wondered if the man knew who he was, that he should presume to protect him. But if he did not know who he was, why come to his rescue with the flue? All the eyes in the circle except Hook's and a blind woman's focused on him. He knew he should speak and took a breath to begin.

Staring at a beam of the ceiling, Hook announced further variations in his argument. "The panic of 1857 and not the Negro lay behind the attack on the south. When the shooting died the Negro became merely a cause for pecu-lation. The administration of Lincoln's man Grant was without a doubt the most crooked the nation had seen until the other Republican, Harding, came to power. Now he was around in my time: a man you would have thought dirt wouldn't cling to, as tall as a church door, and trimmed like Moses...."

"Well you can't blame Lincoln for Grant," Mrs. Mortis said.

Hook's mustache broadened humorously. "They were as close as Baal and Mammon," he said. "Lincoln was no lover of morals. In private practice he was an atheist, you know."

"A Deist, wasn't he?" Conner said. "A Unitarian."

"Is Mr. Conner with us?" Elizabeth Heinemann cried beautifully, turning her head on her slender neck pathetically, as if she could see.

"Yes, dear," Mary Jamiesson said, "he's been building us a fire."

"I heard that someone was. Thank you, Mr. Conner."

"Thank you," Tommy Franklin echoed, and further murmurs sounded.

"You're quite welcome--I, I'm sorry that this rain has delayed the fair."

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